23 May 2018 3:07 PM

I was amused this morning by the contrast in coverage, in different outlets, of Oxford University’s latest figures on its struggle to satisfy the diversity fanatics.

Such people believe that our great universities should alter their entrance requirements in the cause of diversity, so as to achieve equality of outcome.

This view has, in recent years become pretty much universal, and I’ll come to that later. What those who accede to it do not realise is that, once they do so, they will still never actually satisfy these demands.

The Daily Telegraph headlined its report ‘A fifth of Oxford enrolments are now black or ethnic students’. You would have thought this was good news for the diversity campaigners, whose preoccupation with skin colour greatly troubles a sixties veteran such as me . We chanted – and believed - that there was ‘One Race – the Human Race’, and were appalled by South Africa’s system of racial classification based upon colour. While I understand that the modern state’s use of a parallel classification has a wholly different purpose, I still find it disturbing.

The Telegraph (publishing Oxford University’s new full disclosure of its admissions figures), reported that last year the number of Oxford students classed as ‘Black and ethnic minority rose to 17.9%, up from 13.9% four years ago.

In another triumph for equality of outcome, it was revealed more than six in 10 Oxford students were from state schools, said to be the highest level in the university’s history. I am not sure if this claim s true. By the mid-1960s, grammar schools and direct-grant schools were sending an ever-increasing number of pupils to Oxford, reaching 51% in 1965 (recorded in the Franks Report of 1966). In the brief remaining years during which these excellent state schools still existed in large numbers, it is quite possible that state school admissions reached 58%. Certainly my university, York, had a huge number of grammar school entrants when I started there in 1970, probably the last year in which there were still enough grammars and direct grants to achieve this effect. But I know of no Oxford statistics on this after 1966.

The Independent put it slightly differently, saying ‘A report by the institution found the proportion of UK undergraduates from disadvantaged areas was 11 per cent in 2017. This was an increase from 7 per cent in 2013, the Annual Admissions Statistical Report showed.

‘The proportion of students identifying as black and minority ethnic was 18 per cent last year, up from 14 per cent in 2013. There was a slight increase in the number of admissions from state schools during the same period, from 57 per cent to 58 per cent.’

The Times, in a strange, oblique story about how privileged Oxford students now seem to study geography, noted that ‘David Lammy, Labour MP for Tottenham, was instrumental in Oxford’s decision to release its admissions data annually from today. He spent years using freedom of information requests to build a picture of who gets a place.

But Mr Lammy was not - of course - satisfied by the news. He said the report had several key omissions, including data on how many students were drawn from the richest 20 per cent of households and how many of the state school students were from grammar school. Oxford said it did not have these breakdowns.

But why does Mr Lammy want to know? So that he can call for the opening of more grammars as they do so well? Somehow I doubt it).

Oxford, rather reasonably, pointed out that the proportion of black students was above the 1.8 per cent of black A-level students who get three ‘A’ grades [at ‘A’ level], generally essential for Oxford entrance.

But the most striking coverage came in the Guardian, which gave the story its most prominent position, and presented it as a failure by Oxford. The print edition headlined it ‘Oxford faces anger over failure to improve diversity among students’ – a line of attack more or less completely followed by the BBC’s Radio 4 ‘Today’ programme.

It opened : ‘Oxford’s glacial progress in attracting students from diverse backgrounds has been revealed in figures showing that more than one in four of its colleges failed to admit a single black British student each year between 2015 and 2017.

Several of the most prestigious colleges, including Balliol, University and Magdalen, each admitted two black British students as undergraduates during the three-year period.

The worst figures belonged to Corpus Christi College, which admitted a single black British student in those three years and attracted a dozen such applications.

Overall, white British applicants were twice as likely to be admitted to undergraduate courses as their black British peers – 24% of the former gained entry and 12% of the latter.’

I’d make a couple of comments about the above figures. It is extremely difficult for *anyone* to get into Oxford, from any sort of school. Oxford and Cambridge annually reject thousands of applicants from state and private schools, whose A level results are excellent.

Oxford’s point, that ‘the proportion of black students was above the 1.8 per cent of black A-level students who get three ‘A’ grades [at ‘A’ level],’ seems to me to destroy at a blow any suggestion that some sort discrimination is at work here.

As for the figures of black students at individual colleges, these seem to me to be indicative of nothing much. If you researched the presence, in individual colleges, of any other group of applicants which formed 1.8% of qualified applicants, you would find low numbers of that group in some colleges, and none at all in others. The colleges vary greatly in size.

I am told that there are also one or two other measurable factors – black students tend to apply for the vocational courses that are hardest to get into. And disproportionately large numbers of black students fail to meet the required grades after getting offers.

These facts may indicate problems in the school system, but they do not reveal discrimination at Oxford itself.

Now, many people genuinely believe that Oxford and Cambridge should deal with this problem by making special exceptions and exemptions.

I am not one of them. I don’t think I need to go into *all* the possible reasons. I have one main one. Oxford and Cambridge are good because they are hard to get into. Those who can get past their selection are more likely to benefit from the courses they offer than those who cannot. Of course, those who fall behind in education through no fault of their own deserve and need help, but an undergraduate course is really too late in life for such remedial action. The effect of monitoring Oxbridge colleges for diversity will be to turn these great universities into comprehensive universities, just like the rest of our failed education system, so making them worse.

If we want our great universities to be fairer, without damaging them, then we have to do something about schools, in my view both in primary schools and in secondaries, before disadvantages solidify into permanence . I have in fact put thus point to Professor Louise Richardson, the University Vice-Chancellor, when I sat at the same table as her at an Oxford dinner a couple of years ago. I told her about the amazing success of the grammar and direct grant schools, in winning places at Oxford in the 1950s and 1960s. I even followed up our conversation by sending her a brief note, giving her the research references for these facts. Alas, I have seen no sign since that she is interested. This is a great pity. Voices such as hers could turn the tide in this debate.

It is only because the telescoped grades of the GCSE and the diluted ‘A’ level replaced the fierce grading of the old pre-1965 O and A levels, that Oxbridge can set three ‘A’ grades as the necessary minimum. Three ‘A’ grades at ‘A’ level in 1965 was, if not unheard of, pretty uncommon.

When I was at school it was often stated, and I believe it to have been true, that a set of English ‘A’ levels were more or less equivalent to an American university degree. There was a thing called the Brain Drain, under which American employers came to this country to recruit our graduates because they were so far ahead of Americans of the same age.

The decision to introduce comprehensive education was falsely sold as ‘grammar schools for all’ because Labour knew perfectly well that grammar schools were popular and people liked them. In its 1959 manifesto, Labour fibbed : ‘…we shall get rid of the 11-plus examination. The Tories say this means abolishing the grammar schools. On the contrary, it means that grammar-school education will be open to all who can benefit by it.’ (My emphasis) In 1964, Labour equally falsely stated in its manifesto ‘Within the new system, grammar school education will be extended: in future no child will he denied the opportunity of benefiting from it through arbitrary selection at the age of 11.’ (My emphasis). We now have arbitrary selection at 11 by parental wealth, and in any case comprehensive standards are way below those of grammars in 1964.

The House of Commons Library recently produced a briefing paper comparing school exam performance in the year 2014-15. On the key measure of the percentage achieving five or more GCSEs at grades A* to C, including English and Maths, grammars achieved 96.7 per cent.

The average for all state schools was 58.1 per cent. That was, interestingly, also the average for all independent schools. For comprehensives it was 56.7 per cent. For the (wrongly despised) secondary moderns, it was 49.7 per cent. Note the rather small difference between secondary moderns and comprehensives, which we were told would be so much better, thanks to some strange magical cargo-cult process through which destroying grammars would bring benefits to those who could not go to them.

What we actually have is secondary moderns for all, except the rich. And these glorified secondary moderns (nowadays known as ‘academies’) feed their pupils into second-rate universities, for which they must pay large fees and become indebted, , while often denying them the vocational education they really need.

Academic selection in secondary schools would benefit the primary schools which prepared children for that selection, and the universities which received their pupils. Standards would rise for all, and the children of the poor, whatever the colour of their skin, would have a far greater chance of achieving full use of their talents than they can dream of now. By the way, has anyone done any work on how many children from what is called the ‘white working class’ are getting into Oxford? That might be interesting.

18 February 2018 8:26 AM

No, they are not going to bring back times tables. Teachers think this sort of thing is beneath them, and that making any child learn things is cruel. I must have heard education ministers promise to restore times tables 20 times. Nothing ever happens, except that the unfortunate politician is asked on air to say what nine eights are, and can’t.I do wish some of them would retaliate by testing the TV and radio presenters who torment them on their knowledge of the tables. I doubt whether most of them could cope.

Even I, properly drilled in tables at a strict-regime school in the 1950s, trip up sometimes. On Friday, I was shocked and mortified to find I couldn’t do 11x11. But most politicians and TV presenters, being far younger than I am, never endured what I did, the rhythmic, endless chanting as we sat in rows, while the sun shone temptingly outside. They were sometimes ‘tested’ at school, while their poor parents were expected to make themselves unpopular with their children do the actual teaching, perhaps in the car. But that rarely works.

This is a pity, because my times tables are the one part of my schooling that I still consciously use, many times a day. I still need them. And so does everyone else. So why is this latest pledge, like all the others, a fantasy and a false promise? It’s partly because all proper education rests on authority, on the idea that adults have something to teach, and children have much to learn.

And teachers no longer have any real authority. What they have is conditional authority, while luck lasts. Teachers are seldom more than 30 seconds and three feet away from an accusation of abuse that, even if totally untrue, will ruin their lives and their careers irrevocably. They can charm. Or they can bluff. In some cases the bluff is backed up by almost totalitarian regimes in schools with charismatic, overpowering heads. But such heads usually find subtle ways of excluding troublesome children, either before they arrive, or afterwards. But the excluded ones have to go somewhere.

And that means that most of the difficult stuff, from times tables on up to irregular verbs in foreign languages, either is not done at all, or is skirted around, except in highly selective schools, state or private, almost all of which pick their children and parents on the basis of wealth and privilege. Even then, look and see how the numbers taking languages, especially, decline over the years.

But of course the grades go on getting better, and the number of people with supposed ‘qualifications’ and alleged ‘degrees’ gets bigger and bigger, even if no-one knows what six nines are. But employers, if they can, somehow seem to prefer to hire Poles or Romanians. We may have the certificates. But it is the people from the old-fashioned countries that tend to have the education.

******

Seventeen more deaths because we won't ask a simple question

Amid all the usual fuss about guns, important information about Nikolas Cruz, the alleged Florida shooter, is as usual obscured.

So here it is. The Miami Herald spoke to his aunt, Barbara Kumbatovic, who said ‘I know he did have some issues, and he may have been taking medication.’ Other reports speak of him having received ‘treatment’ for mental problems – which almost invariably means powerful mind-altering drugs, often known to cause suicidal or violent thoughts.

Can I make this simple point again? The USA has always had freely-available guns, indeed they used to be more freely available than they are now. It has had schools, and racialist fanatics too, for more than a century. Yet these school massacres are a feature of the modern era.

And what is new about the modern era? Two things: the widespread use of illegal mind-altering drugs, especially marijuana; and the even more widespread use of legal mind-altering drugs, especially SSRI ‘antidepressants’, but also steroids and ‘ADHD’ drugs, often amphetamines which are illegal in any other circumstances.

It was revealed the other day that the three London Bridge killers Khuram Butt, Rachid Redouane, and Youssef Zaghba, had taken ‘large quantities’ of steroids before their crimes last June. Steroids had also been taken by Khalid Masood, the Westminster murderer, and by Omar Mateen, the Orlando night-club mass murderer, and by Anders Breivik, the Norway mass killer.

Almost every terror killer in Europe in the past few years has been a cannabis user. You might also like to know that SSRI ‘antidepressants’ were used by at least one of the Columbine High School killers. The other’s medical records are sealed, though there are strong indications that he too was taking such pills.

This is nothing like a complete list. It would be longer still if the authorities showed any interest in this fascinating and important correlation, but as yet they do not.

Quite often, those who end up on prescription pills became mentally ill after using marijuana, which is increasingly correlated with mental trouble. Police nowadays no longer bother to pursue this crime, so it is quite possible for it to go unrecorded

All this may be totally irrelevant. But then again, it may be important. In which case, we need to act. Once again, I offer these facts in the hope that someone in government or Parliament will hold the inquiry into this connection which is so badly needed.

*******

As the horrible abusive crimes of some Oxfam workers are revealed, left-wing types crowd the media saying that these outrages are individual misdeed and should not unleash a fury against foreign aid in general.

Well, I agree. But these same left-wing types did not take this view when abuse was revealed in Churches. They used the crimes of individual priests as a weapon with which to beat the Christian religion as a whole. I warned against this. I said that abuse could just as easily happen in liberal, secular outfits.

Now that the BBC and Oxfam have both proved me right, will the left soften their bigoted fury against religion? What do you think?

*******

The Guardian newspaper, which thinks very highly of itself, has this week made a public apology to me, for telling a serious untruth about me. It has done so in a very obscure place, and very grudgingly, but it has done so. I count this as a triumph. You will have to visit my blog for the details (if you are lucky, yours may be the 30 millionth visit, as I’m fast approaching that total).

********

What would you think of a country or a company which publicly claimed that someone was a wicked paedophile, was found to be mistaken - and then refused to apologise and did it again? Hang on, I haven’t finished. What would you think if that country or company then refused to allow the accused person’s 93-year-old niece to have the lawyer of her choice at the hearing? You’d think you were dealing with arrogant, tyrannical fat cats. But actually, the culprits in this are the Church of England, still unable to admit a grave error in besmirching the name of the late Bishop George Bell. Why and how does Archbishop Justin Welby permit this behaviour?

Share this article:

03 December 2017 1:24 AM

Our education system teaches the young what to think, not how to think. And if you ever wonder why so many things don’t work properly any more, or why you can’t get any sense out of so many organisations, this is one of the main reasons.

But it’s also getting harder and harder to think or say certain things. This week I experienced this mixture of brainwashing and propaganda at two different ends of the system.

I was sent a rather sinister questionnaire given to new arrivals at a secondary school I won’t name.

And I was the target of a bizarre and rather sad counter-demonstration at one of Oxford’s most exalted colleges. They are, in a way, connected.

The questionnaire is part of what has now become PSHCE, Personal, Social, Health and Citizenship Education. It is not anonymous, but it seeks, in a slippery sideways manner, to discover what the children involved think about immigration.

The cleverest question asks 11-year-olds to say why they think there is a shortage of jobs for younger people. One answer on the multiple-choice form is ‘competition from international applicants’.

They are asked to agree or disagree with such statements as ‘I like to be around people from other countries’ and ‘meeting students from other countries is interesting’. They are also invited to say how much they agree or disagree with the statement ‘immigration is bad for the country’.

They are asked if they have close friends from different countries, and how they would speak to a person whose first language isn’t English. And they are asked if immigrants should have the same rights as everyone else, whether they should be encouraged to speak the language of this country or encouraged to continue in their own traditions.

Well, I agree very strongly with the parent who sent this to me because she thought it was sinister probing into the minds of children, and also into her own opinions, none of the business of the school or the State.

Might some little symbol be placed against the name of any pupil who answered in the wrong way? Might it affect that pupil’s future and the attitude of the school towards the parents? If not, what is the educational purpose of this?

There’s no doubt a terrible conformism has infected our system. When I went to speak at Balliol College in Oxford about the restoration of grammar schools, I was met by a smallish, silent crowd holding up placards objecting to my presence there.

Judging from the righteous looks on their faces, they knew they were right. When I asked them to explain their point of view, they said nothing (unless you count one small raspberry). But I was handed two sheets of paper in which I was thoroughly denounced and hugely misrepresented as ‘Transphobic’ and ‘homophobic’.

I was, this indictment said, ‘a figure of hostility and hatred’. It ended in a sort of farce. A young woman positioned herself in front of me, walking slowly backwards while holding up a home-made placard proclaiming ‘History will forget you’. It hasn’t even remembered me yet.

Alas, she was walking backwards towards a large and prickly bush. She was so set on scorning me that she paid no heed when I warned her of her peril, and she duly reversed into it. No shrubs were hurt in the making of this protest, but it put her off her stride.

Still, history repeats itself. And if on this occasion the first time was farce, the next time could be tragedy. Such people will very soon be fanning out into politics, the law and the media. How long before they have the power to silence and punish me and you? Not as long as you think.

*****

Smashing film, shame about the facts

Battle Of The Sexes, the new film about the great tennis player Billie Jean King, is a terrific watch – funny, dramatic, clever and morally satisfying. You come out of the cinema surprised by how long you’ve been there, which doesn’t happen often.

But the more I looked into the actual events portrayed, the more I felt I’d been used and bamboozled. I have to be careful here or the Guardian newspaper will make up more lies about me. So let me say that I admire Billie Jean King as a sportswoman and as a tough campaigner for women’s freedom. I am also pleased she has found happiness in her life with a female partner.

I loathed the condescension and the legal restrictions still inflicted on women in the 1970s, and was personally and politically glad to see them swept away. And if that was all the film celebrated, I’d be content. But it wasn’t that simple. Billie Jean’s husband is rightly shown as a thoughtful and generous man. Yet the girlfriend who introduced Billie Jean to same-sex love is more than slightly idealised.

And another great tennis player of the age, Margaret Court, is portrayed as a sour and crabbed person. Could this be because she disapproved of the sexual revolution and has now become a minister in a very conservative church? I think it may be so.

Also, very little is made of the awkward, unavoidable fact that women’s tennis prospered because it was sponsored by cigarette brand Virginia Slims. Was the cause so good that this sordid bargain was justified?

Slim cigarettes, as far as I know, still kill those who smoke them, and this was no secret in the 1970s. But perhaps most startling of all is the great match which is the climax of the film, when Billie Jean defeats the male-chauvinist braggart Bobby Riggs, so exploding his boasts of superiority.

But you’d never know from the movie that US media have explored, and not disproved, serious claims that Riggs, a habitual gambler with Mafia contacts, deliberately lost the game to pay off a large debt to the Godfather and his boys.

He’d easily beaten Margaret Court. So maybe it wasn’t as conclusive as all that. Why leave this out? Films about factual events, it seems to me, have a duty to stick as close to the truth as possible. Dramatic licence is fine, but not when it puts the audience in the dark about what really happened.

*****

Sailors should stick to their ships

Her Majesty’s bluejackets are not meant to look smart. They are meant to take, burn, sink and destroy the enemy, and scare them the rest of the time.

They can sometimes be compelled into a semblance of spit and polish, but they just look silly and slightly sinister guarding Buckingham Palace.

Armed sailors on the street make me think of Petrograd in 1917 and Berlin in 1918, a sign that mutiny was in the air and order was breaking down.

And why aren’t they in their ships? In this case it is for an almost equally alarming reason – we hardly have any ships any more, at least ships that can be made to move and fight, and aren’t broken down or for sale.

As the number of spare seamen grows, what other unsuitable jobs will the Defence Ministry find for them? Tending the flowers at Kew Gardens?

If you want to comment on Peter Hitchens, click Comments and scroll down

Share this article:

19 November 2017 12:03 AM

Most of these politically correct fads are just designed to wind us up and provoke us. For example, I now regret having wasted so much time trying to argue rationally about same-sex marriage. All the sexual revolutionaries wanted was an excuse to call me a bigot. They could then ignore everything I said, or tell lies about me, or both.

It was a tiny issue. In 2014, for example, in England and Wales, there were 247,372 heterosexual weddings, and 4,850 same-sex marriages. Already there are several hundred same-sex divorces each year.

Once the novelty has worn off, I suspect the numbers of same-sex unions will decrease, just as heterosexual ones are doing. The point – that the old ways are dead and gone – will have been made, and the campaigners will move on to something else.

I once thought the same about the transgender issue. But the idea that people are whatever sex they think they are is a terrifying weapon in the hands of modern Thought Police. Whatever you say, you cannot possibly be right about this.

Express any opinion (apart from total submission), and within minutes you will be besieged by condemnation. It will be cleverly based on the idea that you are somehow being cruel to some troubled person, even though you aren't doing this at all.

But that is just a pretext. In reality, a whole moral and social system is being destroyed, and traditional ideas of male and female are the next target, now that husbands and marriage have been done away with. For once you begin down the road of sexual revolution, there's no end. There will always be someone more militant than you.

Since the French Revolutionaries set up the guillotine, the same thing has been true. Revolutions are all based on the false idea that humans and their nature can be changed.

And once changed, they will fit neatly into the Utopia that is planned for them. Utopia, as we find every so often in Russia, China and Cambodia, can only be approached across a sea of blood, and you never actually arrive.

The opposite view (now very unfashionable) is that we are all made in the image of God and cannot be changed into something else. This sounds odd to most modern ears. But in fact it is the foundation for the absolute respect for human life and liberty which underpins civilisation. Once it's gone, you can make excuses for anything in the name of some invented 'right'. Mass abortion is the obvious example.

And that is why The Mail on Sunday's exclusive story, that a teacher has been disciplined for failing to respect the transgender gospel, is so important. His slip was small, and momentary. One of his pupils, who would once have been called a girl, has decided to be male. He called this person a girl. So he must suffer.

In the vanished world of absolute truth, the student's sex would not be a matter of opinion. People might (and I would favour this) treat the person's view of their sex with sympathy and try to go along with it. Who would want to hurt somebody on a matter of such delicacy?

But in the new revolutionary world, truth is what the revolution says it is. This works in many ways.

A Left-wing newspaper recently claimed I had said something I had not said, and do not think. Shown irrefutable evidence that I had not used the words alleged, it continued to claim that I had used them, because that is what it thought I had said.

This leads down a very dark staircase. Reality must increasingly be forced to fit the beliefs of the new elite. Teachers must be punished for speaking the truth, so schools are no longer places where truth is respected or dissent allowed – which means they are dead to all intents and purposes.

And perhaps most grievous of all, teenagers are placed on a medical conveyor belt which leads to powerful body-changing drugs and possibly to surgical alteration.

It is not just crabbed reactionaries such as me who fret about this. In an eloquent article in The Times, the far-from-conservative commentator Janice Turner recently warned: 'But in a decade, when our adult children turn to ask, 'Why did you let me do this? Why didn't you stop me?' we may wonder if this was progress or child abuse.'

The answer to the question 'Why didn't you stop me?' will be even sadder.

We are failing to stop this because we are afraid of the intolerant revolutionary mob, which would lock up dissenters if it could, but for the moment contents itself with Twitter storms and witch-hunts.

I can't laugh this off. It is not just a wind-up. It is a threat to free thought and, after many months of staying silent about it, I feel I have to say so.

That faint rumble you can hear is the mob assembling for another heresy hunt.

An image that tells you all you need to know about duty

The sight of the Queen and Prince Philip watching the Remembrance ceremony last Sunday was almost unbearably poignant for me and (I suspect) many of my generation.

The Duke of Edinburgh was plainly straining every nerve and sinew to do honour to the fellow warriors he actually knew and fought alongside so long ago, despite the burden of his great age. Nothing on Earth was going to stop him doing that. There are so few left from that time. The Queen, with an almost equal effort of will, was yielding one of her most important duties to her successor, a very hard duty indeed.

They are now both so far ahead of us in years that they already seem to be in another time altogether, almost beyond our reach. It is disquieting and upsetting to see these things, inevitable as they are. I feel a great sense of foreboding.

The Prime Minister rattled her plastic sabre at the Russians

Last Monday the Prime Minister rattled her plastic sabre at the Russians, in a silly speech at the Mansion House. She doesn't even know what she's talking about. She said: 'Russia's illegal annexation of Crimea was the first time since the Second World War that one sovereign nation has forcibly taken territory from another in Europe.' This is wrong. Nato Turkey (now an increasingly nasty despotism) seized Northern Cyprus in 1974 and still sits there, unpunished.

She claimed Russia had 'repeatedly violated the national airspace of several European countries'. I asked No 10 for details. Two days later, whimpering that the information was somehow secret, a spokesman could only admit 'Russia has not violated UK airspace'. So whose airspace had it 'repeatedly' violated? No answer. If it's true, the Russians must know, so why the secrecy? The Russian threat is a fake.

Antidote to The Death Of Stalin

At last there is an antidote to the foolish film The Death Of Stalin, which trivialises this monster and his crimes. It is Angus Macqueen's brilliant, harrowing documentary Gulag, which you can watch on the BBC iPlayer only until December 6.

See it above all for the astonishing film of the man-made hell called Norilsk, and the interview with a woman who explains exactly how Stalin robbed her of the ability to trust her fellow humans. But be warned: there are no jokes.

which contains the best explanation I have seen so far of what precisely is going on, and why Black applicants to Oxford are not doing as well as might be expected.

I note however that the school he recommends is an academically selective one, which is oddly allowed at 15 but not at 11 or 13, the ages at which many bright children from poor homes sink in the chaos of bad 'comprehensives. By 15 it;s too late for them, and by 18 (the other age at which academic selection is allowed and considered normal) even more too late.

This blog by Katharine Birbalsingh, head of the Michaela School,(full disclosure: Ms Birbalsingh and I have been taking part in a friendly running argument over many months over grammar schools) is also terrific:

I append below some relevant figures I obtained on Friday from Oxford and Cambridge Universities, which I display without comment, but on which I would welcome any information or explanation. I think both articles linked above may be helpful in understanding them.

Share this article:

20 October 2017 2:58 PM

Many of you will have seen the considerable fuss today over The Guardian’s story about how few children from certain backgrounds obtain places at Oxbridge. The facts as stated are not in dispute. The difficulty lies in interpreting them.

It seems to me that the suggestion is being made implicitly, without actually being explicitly stated, that Oxbridge is discriminating against ethnic minorities and against applicants from poorer parts of the country.

I think, and explain in detail why below, with research backing, that this is simply untrue.

The explanation lies in the low expectations and defeatism of far too many State School teachers, who fail to encourage bright pupils to apply to Oxbridge. And it lies in the miserable discrimination against the poor imposed by our failed and unreformable comprehensive school system, which discriminates constantly against children from poor homes, by confining them to inferior schools after ruthless selection by wealth.

The story was much taken up by the BBC (though the BBC Today programme’s reports oddly concentrated on the paucity of Oxbridge places going to applicants from outside the wealthy South-East, whereas Mr Lammy and the Guardian seemed more interested in the small numbers of Black undergraduates).

It originated in The Guardian, following a Freedom of Information request by the Labour MP David Lammy. The Guardian account of this can be read here

The website headline “Oxford accused of 'social apartheid' as colleges admit no black students” (my emphasis) is a bit naughty. ‘Colleges admit no black students’ is misleading, and should really have begun with the word ‘some’. Anyone who doesn’t understand the structure of Oxford and Cambridge, which each have many colleges which admit students directly, might get a wholly wrong impression from this headline.

Interestingly the print headline is quite different, saying ‘Oxbridge still failing black British pupils’ , with the sub-heading ‘One in three Oxford colleges took no black A-level students in 2015’ For as it happens , while some Oxbridge colleges did take no black students, many did admit black students. As the report says ‘The data shows that 10 out of 32 Oxford colleges did not award a place to a black British pupil with A-levels in 2015, the first time the university has released such figures since 2010.’ (This link is worth following), that means that 22 out of 32 Oxford colleges did admit back students.’ Which is not quite the same as ‘colleges admit no black students’. If the Ancient Universities were not made up of colleges and were being judged *as Universities*, this sort of thing couldn’t be said. I think it’s tricky myself, and might well mislead those who don’t understand that Colleges often specialise in particular subjects, that some are far smaller than others, and that those who are rejected by one college are quite often pooled and gain places in another.

It adds that Oriel College only offered one place to a black British A-level student in six years’. Why is Oriel College picked out? Could it be a reference to Oriel College’s famous statue of Cecil Rhodes, the focus of some campaigning by the left in recent years? I have no idea.

‘Similar data released by Cambridge revealed that six colleges there failed to admit any black British A-level students in the same year.’ I would once again point out that this means a lot of other Cambridge colleges did admit black students that year. I believe that 25 out of 31 Cambridge colleges admit undergraduates on leaving school, so I think that means 19 Cambridge colleges *did* admit Black British A level students.

For me, the problem in such stories always lies in the assumption of the left (similarly made in presenting crime statistics etc) that the explanation for this must be some sort of racial prejudice.

Mr Lammy said ‘Difficult questions have to be asked, including whether there is systematic bias inherent in the Oxbridge admissions process that is working against talented young people from ethnic minority backgrounds’.

Do they?

I cannot myself think of any institutions in Britain less likely than Oxford and Cambridge to discriminate on the grounds of skin colour. It is hard to find an Oxbridge academic who is not way put on the politically correct left, and in any case, racial bigotry is such a *stupid* thing that it is hard to see it being prevalent in such places. I’m also well aware, from personal knowledge, as an Oxford resident acquainted with some of those involved, of the determined efforts Oxford colleges make to recruit applicants from outside the privileged classes who inevitably (I’ll come to this) make up the bulk of their undergraduates.

As the Guardian admitted ‘Oxford said students from black and minority ethnic backgrounds made up 15.9% of its 2016 UK undergraduate intake, up from 14.5% in 2015, and that offers to black students had more than doubled since 2010. Those figures include British Asian students and other minorities.’

Mr Lammy, very interestingly, went on to say ‘There are almost 400 black students getting three As at A-level or better every year,’ yet few of them are attracted to apply to Oxford or Cambridge. Around 3% of the British population identified as black in the last UK census.’

Note that he does not say that 400 black students with good A levels *apply* to Oxbridge every year. Because, I strongly suspect, they mostly don’t apply. Oxford and Cambridge can work miracles, but they cannot admit students who haven’t applied to them. Might this have rather more to do with the problem? And, come to that, could there also be a connection between these figures and the fact that many Black students come from poor backgrounds and are therefore condemned to the sub-standard schools reserved for those whose parents are not rich? I wonder how many young men and women from poor ‘white’ homes get into Oxbridge each year. I suspect it is not many. I also suspect few apply.

A frequent contributor here, Geoffrey Warner, is (like me) a strong supporter of the restoration of a national grammar school system, which at its height was dominated by working class boys and girls ( 65% of pupils according to Table J in the Gurney Dixon report of 1954) and whose products were by 1965 out-performing the great public schools in getting places at Oxford without any special provision (see the Franks Report 1966 -

In 1966, the Franks Report into Oxford University showed that, during the selective era which began in 1944, the proportion of state and direct-grant pupils entering Oxford rose rapidly. Such schools had won 32% of places in 1938-9. By 1958-9, they won 45% (Direct Grants 15%, ordinary grammars 30%) and by 1965-5 they won 49% (Direct Grants 17%, ordinary grammars 32%) .These improvements were achieved without any special concessions, and despite the private schools’ inbuilt advantage in Classics, then essential for Oxbridge entry.) and presumably at Cambridge too. This process went backwards after the dissolution of most grammar schools between 1965 and 1975, and has only been restored by, er, elaborate corrective methods now very much in operation. Geoffrey Warner reminded me this morning that a year ago (13th October 2016) the Sutton Trust had published the results of a survey of state school teachers, asking them about their attitudes towards Oxbridge.

It reported ‘Four in ten teachers said they would rarely or never advise their cleverest children to apply – despite the opportunities this could offer the students, a study found.

Of those admitting they did not encourage pupils, 19 per cent said it was because they felt the children were unlikely to get in and 13 per cent said they didn’t think they would be happy there.’

The Daily Mail and the Guardian both reported this finding. The Mail wrote: ‘STATE school teachers refuse to encourage bright, disadvantaged pupils to apply to Oxford and Cambridge because they assume most 'won't be happy there'.

Four in ten teachers said they would rarely or never advise their cleverest children to apply - despite the opportunities this could offer the students, a study found.

Of those admitting they did not encourage pupils, 19 per cent said it was because they felt the children were unlikely to get in and 13 per cent said they didn't think they would be happy there.

The findings come amid a Government drive to increase the number of students from deprived backgrounds going to top universities. In previous years, both Oxford and Cambridge have faced criticism for not doing enough to encourage children from state schools and disadvantaged backgrounds to apply for courses.

Theresa May has highlighted the injustice of white working class boys being the least likely group to attend university.

The Government hopes to reintroduce grammar schools to the poorest areas in the country to help more disadvantaged bright children get into Oxbridge.

Yesterday, experts said the findings showed many teachers in the comprehensive system were failing to help bright students fulfil their potential.

The study of 1,607 primary and secondary school teachers was carried out by the Sutton Trust, a charity providing educational opportunities for children from under-privileged backgrounds.

Sir Peter Lampl, chairman of the Sutton Trust, said: 'Many state school teachers don't see Oxbridge as a realistic goal for their brightest pupils. It is vital that the universities step up their outreach activities to address teachers' and students' misconceptions.' Chris McGovern, of the Campaign for Real Education, said: 'Lots of teachers, it seems, are actively damaging the future prospects of the children they teach.

'If the Government seeks an extra argument in favour of grammar schools for helping raise the attainment and expectation of children from deprived backgrounds, this research finding provides it.' The news comes ahead of the deadline this Saturday for applying to Oxford and Cambridge.

Just one-fifth of the polled teachers said they always advised their bright pupils to apply and a quarter said they usually did.

Researchers also found teachers' common misconceptions extended to the proportion of state school students at Oxford and Cambridge.

Just over a fifth thought fewer than 20 per cent of students came from the state sector when the actual figure is about 60 per cent.

Alan Smithers, professor of education at the University of Buckingham, said: 'It is shameful that these teachers cut across the chances of bright, poor pupils by assuming they would not be happy there.'

The Guardian reported, under the headline State school teachers still not pushing best pupils to Oxbridge.

‘More than 40% of state secondary school teachers rarely or never advised their brightest pupils to apply to Oxford or Cambridge, according to a survey of teachers. Research by the Sutton Trust reveals that despite a decade of well-funded outreach to state schools by both universities, the proportion of teachers who would encourage kids to apply has not changed substantially since the trust asked the same question nine years ago.

The survey by the educational charity also revealed teachers' stubborn misconceptions about the background of those pupils who did gain entry to Oxbridge, with the majority of those who responded underestimating the success rate of state school applicants, many by a wide margin.

"We know how important teachers are in shaping young people's aspirations which is why we run teacher summer schools at Oxford and Cambridge," said Sir Peter Lampl, the Sutton Trust's founder and chairman.

"Today's polling tells us that many state school teachers don't see Oxbridge as a realistic goal for their brightest pupils. The reasons are they don't think they will get in and, if they get in, they don't think they will fit in. It is vital that the universities step up their outreach activities to address teachers' and students' misconceptions." The figures come as the deadline for next year's Oxbridge applications looms on 15 October.

The poll of 1,600 primary and secondary school teachers found that little more than a fifth always advised their brightest students to apply to Oxbridge, while 28% said they usually advised them to.

But of those teachers who did not encourage their pupils to apply to Oxbridge, in most cases it was because they did not advise students on their university choices. Of the remainder, nearly a fifth said it was because they did not think their pupils' applications would succeed. But at least one in 20 of the teachers said they would not advise bright pupils to apply because they "didn't think they would be happy there," the survey found.

Both Oxford and Cambridge have spent heavily on widening access in recent years, according to figures from the Office for Fair Access.

In Oxford's case the effort has had success: last month it said nearly 60% of its undergraduate intake were former state school pupils, the highest level for decades and an increase on the nearly 56% it admitted in 2015.

But Louise Richardson, Oxford's new vice-chancellor, believes the university needs to do more in attracting the best. "In an increasingly complex world, the best may not be those who look and sound like ourselves. They may not be those who naturally think of coming to Oxford. Those with the greatest potential may not be those who have already attained the most. We need to seek them out," she said.

It seems to me that the best explanation of this disparity lies there, in the failure of the schools both to educate bright children form poor backgrounds, and to encourage them to apply for the best universities, and it is irresponsible of the Guardian and the BBC to engage in this sort of journalism, when they know perfectly well that this is the case.

Share this article:

10 September 2017 1:43 AM

As we grapple yet again with the problem of our wide-open borders, it is time we realised that there is another reason for this country’s huge migration problem.When I visited the Lincolnshire town of Boston a few years ago, to look at the revolution inflicted on it by mass immigration, I also noted the presence of knots of home-grown British louts and the existence of a smart and costly ‘resource centre’, offering tax-funded advice on how to inject illegal drugs. This plainly had something to do with the problem.At the last count, there were in this country at least 790,000 young people aged between 16 and 24 who were ‘not in education, employment or training’. I suspect that there are plenty more in this miserable category over the age of 24. Bear in mind that all politically important statistics are massaged in some way to conceal the ghastly truth.It is the jobs that such people used to do which are being done by migrants. As the liberal Left ceaselessly and rather stupidly point out, much of what goes on around us, from the NHS to the picking of fruit, the care of the elderly and the running of all those coffee shops, depends on migrant labour. They seem to think this is because the migrants are so nice, as many of them indeed are. BUT migrants don’t work for the NHS or Starbucks out of charity. They do it, perfectly reasonably, for money. Why don’t British people do these jobs? Why do our nurses have to come from Africa? There are three reasons, which no government dares do anything about.The first is the collapse of the old-fashioned family, in which the young learned how to behave. This is worst among the poor. Children who have never known a father’s authority, who arrived at school in nappies, have never shared a meal around a table, can barely read and who speak a sort of mumbled teen patois rather than English, are not going to be any employer’s dream.Forcing them to apply for jobs they don’t really want, from employers who really don’t want them and who would much prefer someone from Portugal or Poland, doesn’t actually solve this. The next is our shameful state school system, whose teachers are often themselves ill-educated. The system strives in vain to teach an academic curriculum to young men and women who really need vocational instruction, because we cannot admit that not all boys and girls need or want the same sort of schools. At the end of this process, the victims are forced into debt to attend university courses far inferior to old-fashioned vocational training. And the third is our welfare system, which responds to failure and misbehaviour by indulging it – a policy which ends by using tax revenues to teach criminals to take illegal drugs ‘safely’, and by handing them substitute drugs, so they can stupefy themselves legally instead. All these subjects lie outside the issues that ambitious career politicians are allowed to address. To do so, you would have to breach the modern taboos of sexism and egalitarianism. And you would have to do something even more heretical – argue that people are responsible for their own actions.Do any of these things and an army of media thought-police will come after you. Always assuming you aren’t forced to stand down as an MP, you will never get anywhere near office or power. We are in the grip of a soft totalitarianism which is no less deadly for being soft. Instead of threatening people with prison for having the wrong opinions, it threatens them with unemployment.If we actually had labour camps and midnight arrests, and state censors sitting in newspaper offices and TV studios, people might notice what was going on. As it is, they just wonder why everything gets worse and worse and nobody does anything about it.

Meet China’s secret weapon – Red Rambo

As we flounder over North Korea (whose leader learned from Iraq that Weapons of Mass Destruction are worth acquiring at any cost), China smiles behind its hand and quietly grows in power.There are many signs of this, but one of the most intriguing is the huge success in China of that country’s first blockbuster rogue hero movie, Wolf Warrior II. Made at great cost to a Hollywood formula, it depicts a Red Chinese Rambo, Leng Feng, played by Jing Wu.He cleverly manages to be both anti-authority at home, and super-patriotic abroad, and has won the warm approval of China’s Communist Party regime. On a revenge mission in Africa, a continent which obsesses the Peking government, he is a noble humanitarian who also defeats an American baddie.The old Soviet Union simply couldn’t manage this sort of propaganda. China, alas, has discovered the secret of how to mix capitalism and modernity with despotism. Some in what is now the free world may be tempted to follow.

Feeble courts are the biggest crime of all

How many times do I need to point out that our prisons are full because our police and courts are too feeble, not because they are too tough?Look at these figures obtained under Freedom of Information rules last week: a burglar who already had 44 convictions for break-ins was not imprisoned. Others left free included a lout who breached an Asbo for the 191st time, a so-called ‘joyrider’ with 26 previous convictions for taking cars, and, of course, a drug abuser with 29 previous convictions.It is very difficult to get such figures out of the criminal justice system. And police absence and uninterest – plus the public despair which discourages the reporting of much crime – means that many thousands of offences are nowadays committed without ever being recorded. A career criminal has probably committed dozens of crimes before the police ever arrest him, several more before he gets anything more than a meaningless caution or an (unpaid) fine, and even more before he gets weedy community service or a suspended sentence that is never activated. It is still much harder to get into prison than to get into university. Prison might scare such people into behaving if it was imposed on a first or second offence. If this happened, many others would be deterred from committing crimes at all.But waiting till someone is a hardened criminal before locking him up is useless against criminal individuals, and deters nobody. Hence the endlessly growing prison population. But the liberal mind is quite closed to the solution. So nothing happens.

******

Look, I like Jacob Rees-Mogg. He generously helped out a few years ago in the battle to save this country from being forced on to Berlin Time. He has cunningly turned the mockery against him to his advantage. I wouldn’t be a bit surprised if he isn’t photographed soon wearing actual double-breasted pyjamas.But the excitement from both sides over his perfectly normal Christian positions on marriage and abortion is ridiculous. Mr Rees-Mogg certainly believes these things. But he hasn’t the slightest hope of doing anything about either. In our increasingly anti-Christian country, he is just taking on the role filled 150 years ago by the Victorian atheist MP Charles Bradlaugh, a lone parliamentary eccentric. The interesting thing is that Britain has, in so short a time, reached a stage where support for lifelong heterosexual marriage, and an aversion to killing unborn babies, are seen as eccentric, brave or outrageous opinions. Did you notice that happening?

If you want to comment on Peter Hitchens, click on Comments and scroll down

Share this article:

25 August 2017 10:57 AM

Here’s what they will never say about British school examinations. All their problems arise from the abolition of most state grammar schools in in the 1960s and 1970s.

Since then, comprehensive state schools have been social engineering machines aimed at creating a more equal society, and incidentally in creating more easily manipulated voters. The first has been a bit of a flop, because it always is, and because our relatively free society allows rich and clever parents to rescue their children from the egalitarian fanatics. But the second has been quite effective.

One of the reasons for this is that examinations give schools purpose and backbone. There’s something to work for. There’s competition. There’s a time limit . Schools without exams are a bit like tennis without a net. In the end the natural inertia of the human race will stop anything much from happening in schools where there’s no aim to work for.

So the nature and rigour of those exams – and the way people are selected to take them, and the subjects into which they are divided - are far more crucial than any national curriculum (generally fictional anyway, as so much of it is optional) or government targets. The devaluation of all examinations, so that the annual results would not show up just how disastrous the comprehensive experiment has been, is just one aspect of the mountain of lies constructed to deceive the public about the real purpose and nature of modern education.

One rather funny unintended consequence of this is that it has made the independent schools, the remaining grammar schools, and the church schools all look much better than they really are. In fact it has saved many mediocre and failing private schools from the doom that would have overtaken them if the grammar schools had survived (private secondary education is almost unknown in Germany, where there are still grammar schools). This is because, if you lower exam standards to make the comprehensives look acceptable, you make selective schools look absolutely wonderful, especially if you make the top grades accessible to mediocre pupils. So, harm done all round. Only a small minority of independent and selective schools have sought to maintain real standards, by using the more rigorous International GCSE instead of the GCSE, and the International Baccalaureate (or the new Cambridge pre-U) instead of ‘A’ levels.

Exams, by the way, are not the same as the wretched tests which take up so much time in state schools these days. They are solid investigations into how much pupils have learned about a given subject, not rigged and drilled attempts to prove that children who cannot really read, write or count can in fact do so.

Before the abolition of the grammar schools, and of their close relatives the Direct Grant schools (independent schools which took in large numbers of state pupils who had passed the eleven plus – a sensible system which you might think met politicians’ repeated demands for the private sector to help the state sector – so why did they abolish them?) , we had two secondary exams at this level.

One was the GCE ‘O’ level, generally taken by pupils at independent, grammar and Direct Grant schools. The other was the CSE, usually taken by pupils at Secondary Moderns. This distinction wasn’t universal. A minority of Secondary Moderns took ‘O’ levels ( and A levels) and even sent pupils on to university. Like Grammar schools, Secondary Moderns varied, from area to area, in quality and intake. Some areas, such as Wales, had far more Grammar Schools than other parts of the country. Surrey, by contrast, had comparatively few grammar schools. Some had better provisions for girls, though in general they had a poor deal when it came to winning grammar school places. Technical schools, promised in the 1944 Education Act, were seldom built, though they were and are badly needed. There were, in short, many reforms that could have been made to the system, which would have improved it greatly, and probably would have cost much less than the comprehensive revolution inaugurated by Anthony Crosland in 1965(and continued by Margaret Thatcher after 1970, though she, unlike Crosland, was unhappy about it) . See the chapter ‘The Fall of the Meritocracy’ in my widely-unread and almost universally unreviewed book ‘The Cameron Delusion’ for the definitive account of this extraordinary episode.

The CSE had 5 grades of pass. Grade One at CSE was considered by schools and employers to be the equivalent of an ‘O’ level pass.

Before 1975, ‘O’ levels were graded differently by rival boards. Some boards graded from A to H, with F, G and H being failure grades for which no certificate was awarded. Others (including the Oxford and Cambridge Board, used by my independent school in Cambridge) graded from 1 to 9, with 7, 8 and 9 being failure grades for which no certificate was awarded. Those certificates which were issued did not , as I remember (for I have never in all my life been asked to produce any of my exam certificates) , mention the grade, which was on a flimsy bit of paper sent out by post . Pay attention here, for these details are important.

By the early 1970s, with the grammars vanishing, standards began to fall. As this was before the age of ‘league tables’, the evidence of this comes in brief intense flashes of light, which some people will no doubt dismiss as ‘anecdotal’. Well, let them.

I have in front of me a cutting from the Daily Telegraph of 11th November 1974, which quotes the late Sir Rhodes Boyson, and Professor Brian Cox ( opponents of ‘progressive education’ as it was then called, before it ran into very serious trouble in the late 1970s). They cited surveys by the education authorities of Manchester and Sheffield.

These showed that since Manchester’s comprehensive reorganisation in 1967, the proportion of Manchester schoolchildren going in for ‘O’ level had been falling sharply. By contrast, in that city’s Roman Catholic grammar and secondary modern schools, not yet reorganised, the proportion had risen. Sheffield’s experience was similar. In a report in October 1975 the Telegraph noted a ‘gradual decline in the percentage of comprehensive school pupils succeeding in GCE examinations’. Pupils at the about-to-be-abolished Direct Grant schools, meanwhile, showed ‘a constant increase in GCE success rates’.

One state school which I will not name abandoned ‘O’ and ‘A’ levels altogether after a collapse in discipline and standards.

But by then, as the late Lynda Lee-Potter wrote in the Daily Mail of 10th September 1975, the O level grading system had been mysteriously altered. There were now 5 grades: A, B and C were the equivalents of the old 1 to 6 or A to E. But a certificate was also awarded to those who received grades D and E. These were roughly the equivalent of the old failing grades (not exactly, of course. D was the equivalent of the old F and the old 7, whereas E was the equivalent of the upper half of the old 8 and the old G).

Miss Lee-Potter complained, in an article I may come back to at another time because of its prophetic force, : “The government have now abolished the words ‘pass ‘ and ‘fail’ because they think it’s wrong to tell children they have failed.’

By the way, I’ll note here that when the GCSE was eventually introduced, as the logical consequence of all this fudging and devaluation, its grades ran from A* (originally A) down to G. F and G were equal to the old CSE grade 4 and 5, and to the top half of the ‘U’ (or ungraded) grade of the post 1975 ‘O’ level.

You need to be good at your letters and numbers to keep up with this, don’t you? But if you look you will see a trend, and it’s downwards all the way. It has to be. Anything else would make it obvious that comprehensive schools are about egalitarian politics (the central project of it, and the new , ironbound Clause Four of New Labour, so fiercely held to that the Tories dare not challenge it) not about good education. And when the public finally realise that, they might just object.

A report in December 1975 said that marks had slumped in GCE exams, but quoted teachers who blamed the raising of the school leaving age and the increasing turnover of teachers. Perhaps these contributed, but given the education industry’s keen support of all-in schools, you can see why they might have sought to avoid mentioning the more obvious explanation – comprehensive schooling.

Funnily enough, it would soon be harder to tell. Experiments in a combined O level and CSE (what would become the GCSE 12 years later) were reported as being already under way, on the initiative of the Schools Council, a Quango of the time, as early in June 1974. This idea had been floated as early as 1972. It would carry on floating – Shirley Williams wanted to introduce the GCSE in her time as Labour Education Secretary, in the late 1970s. Funny that it was eventually introduced by the prototype Thatcherite, Sir Keith Joseph. Poor anguished Sir Keith, I suspect, had little idea what he was doing. But his party has for many years been a false friend to state education. Its senior figures either pay fees, or (like New Labour nobility) live in comfy areas, or (these days, also like Labour toffs) have learned how to wangle their bairns into smart, untypical schools. They aren't interested in a politically difficult true reform.

Now , after leaks that ‘O’ levels were to come back (which this writer disbelieved from the start) , which were then watered down to a more rigorous GCSE, we have the double dog’s breakfast of the Gove Level, or Chewbacca, or whatever it’s to be called. Actually it's the Gove-Clegg level, launched with Michael Gove more or less shackled to Nick Clegg, a flesh-and-blood assurance to the Education establishment that there will in fact be no true return to rigour. It may not happen at all, since the plan has been delayed till so late in the Parliament that Labour can begin to influence it too.

If it doesn’t come off it’ll be no great loss. It would have had to carry on the sustained cover-up of comprehensive failure, just as all the gimmicks, from Blunkett to Gove, have sought to avoid confronting the awful truth which is – without selection, you can’t have good secondary schools.

Share this article:

04 June 2017 8:26 AM

Can we now scrap so-called sex-education and all the rest of the condom-waving and pill-pushing designed to appease and spread the permissive society?

This week we learned the amazing fact that teenage pregnancies have fallen following government cuts in spending on sex education and birth control. This is exactly the opposite of what the sex-education maniacs predicted would happen when the cuts were made.

Yes, you read that correctly. As the sex education diminished, so did the pregnancies. Nearly 20 years ago the Blair government began a multi-million-pound splurge on teen pregnancy ‘co-ordinators’, ‘sexual health clinics’ and sex classes in schools. But as it tailed off, teen pregnancies went down.

Yet the sex-ed maniacs never give up. Even as I write, a brilliantly-organised and sustained campaign is under way to make sex education universal and compulsory and to extend it to primary schools. You’d think it had been a great success.

Not so. A new look at the hard figures by Professor David Paton, of the Nottingham University Business School, and Liam Wright, of the University of Sheffield, explodes these claims. What research we have shows that sex education may increase knowledge, but does not lead to restraint.

So it is worth asking whether this mass of morally-relaxed material, in which free and easy sex is portrayed as normal, actually makes casual sex among the young more likely,

This research comes as no surprise to me. I have been getting into trouble for years for pointing out that decades of ‘harm reduction’, giveaways of contraceptive pills with no questions asked, and ever-lower age-limits, have not achieved their stated aim. The clearest signs of this have been the almost unending climb of abortion figures since the 1960s, and the epidemic of diseases such as Chlamydia.

Casual, loveless sex, , the tragedy of unwanted children, the incessant massacre of the unborn and the spread of sexually transmitted diseases have continued to grow over time.

Of course they have. The research points out that birth control will reduce the risk of pregnancy for sex acts which would have occurred anyway. But teenagers, given easier access to birth control, may be led either into starting to have sex, or having sex more frequently

Sex education did not really get going in this country until the 1950s. It began very cautiously. In 1963, the city of Norwich boosted its school sex education because the number of babies born outside marriage had risen to 7.7%, compared with 5.9% nationally. This was typical of the sort of arguments advanced at the time. Now, it is quite normal for babies to be born outside marriage, in Norwich and everywhere else. Did sex education, which generally refuses to be ‘judgemental’, and bypasses parents by handing out contraceptives to the young without their knowledge, help to make it so?

Is that, in fact, its real purpose? It was first introduced by Hungarian Communists during their brief 1919 revolution, openly aimed at undermining the morals of Roman Catholic schoolgirls. Basically they used state power so they could talk dirty to children. Its advocates here, from the 1930s onwards, have come from the radical left, with their incessant desire to interfere in people’s private lives They claimed that parents could not do the job properly. Well, the schools do it a lot worse, as we plainly see.

It is time that the sex education lobby was subjected to some serious questioning about what its true aim is, and whether it is any good at what it does. Who in British politics will dare challenge these grim-jawed zealots, who march onwards even when the facts are against them?

A bad dose of Christian-bashing

Channel Four has won much modish praise for screening the laughable anti-Christian fantasy ‘The Handmaid’s Tale’, starring a gloriously sulky and smug Elisabeth Moss.

This drama started life as a heavy-handed novel by a politically-correct Canadian, Margaret Atwood.

In her fable, fanatical evangelical Christians take over the USA, and turn it into a tyranny in which they enslave fertile women, raping them once a month in the presence of their wives.

This has not actually happened at all since Ms Atwood wrote her cult book 32 years ago, despite there being lots of evangelical Christians in the USA, and it seems pretty unlikely to take place. Perhaps this is because evangelical Christians aren’t actually like this.

In an embarrassing and lengthy scene in the first episode, the heroine is duly raped. Just in case any of us didn’t get the message, the crime takes place to the background of church organ music, gradually swelling into the sound of a full choir singing ‘Onward Christian Soldiers’.

In case any viewers still don’t understand the point (Christians are bad!), the rapist reads chunks out of the Bible as he proceeds.

As usual, I await a similar drama from Channel Four or any other major TV station, in which Muslims, who have actually set up a state in which women are subjugated, forced to wear demeaning clothing and are enslaved sexually, are portrayed as critically as Christians always are by our new cultural elite.

I repeat a warning I’ve given before. Those who seek to drive Christianity out of our society may be unpleasantly surprised when they find out what actually replaces it.

********

The thing I will always remember about the Panamanian despot Manuel Noriega is that he was driven out of the embassy where he’d sought sanctuary by loud rock music.

It was a brilliant tactic, of course. But it was also an admission that loud rock music is an offensive weapon, and a means of torture. Since then it has often been used as such. And those councils which this summer greedily license rock concerts in parks anywhere near people’s homes should be reminded of that. Nobody’s pleasure is important enough to justify ruining someone else’s peace.

********

I no longer believe there’s a ‘silent majority’ of patriotic conservatives. Decades of comprehensive schooling have done their work, and a squidgy emotive leftism is the default position of most people under 45. So I’m not surprised or dismayed by the audience on the BBC’s ‘Question Time’.

These audiences are also picked from people who are interested in politics, who are mostly activists and mostly leftist. The audience on Radio 4’s ‘Any Questions’, who aren’t selected, are much less predictable.

Even so, this story is interesting. A Tory businessman, David Stoneman, tells me that he tried for years to be part of the QT audience. He filled in the online forms with commendable honesty. He was never asked on. But then he decided to be naughty. He passed himself off as a militant trade unionist train-driver who backed the Leave campaign and opposed fracking. Almost immediately, the people who assemble the QT audiences were in touch wanting to know more. Alas, his nerve failed him and he didn’t go through with it. Quite right too, I suppose. We wouldn’t want people gaming the system.

******

I thought Jeremy Corbyn’s interview of Jeremy Paxman went quite well the other night. The bearded oldster shouldn’t have interrupted the very important Great Paxo quite so much, but Mr Corbyn, grandfatherly old Sinn Fein sympathiser that he is, definitely has a future as a TV personality if other possibilities don’t work out.

28 May 2017 1:02 AM

Theresa May should get herself a stick-on pencil moustache, some very dark glasses and a white military uniform with lots of medals and a set of fancy epaulettes. If she’s going to behave like a Third World leader, she ought to look like one.Troops on the streets, indeed. What a futile non-answer to the problem of terrorist murder this is, and what a complete departure from centuries of British liberty.In all my travels, often to less fortunate parts of the world, troops posted on the streets have been an invariable sign of a society on the skids, and a government that prefers force to thought.How humiliating and embarrassing that such scenes should come to our great free capital.Actually, I suspect it’s something our dim state machine has wanted to do for ages, and now thinks it has the excuse for. Mrs May’s Cabinet, ignorant and lacking the robust old British loathing of such things, gave in and let it happen.What is far worse is that the idea was not then mocked and jeered off the stage by the rest of us, as the ridiculous Blair creature’s futile dispatch of tanks and troops to Heathrow was back in 2003.Year by year our hopeless egalitarian schools and our joke universities turn out more and more citizens who don’t know that you have to defend liberty all the time if you want to keep it.Can anyone explain to me how militarising the country and dotting it with armed men in camouflage battle dress (designed to help them hide in forests) is a rational response to the atrocity in Manchester? Of course not. The two have no connection.On the contrary, the sight of a once-great country over-reacting in this pointless way must cause our enemies to snigger in their bushy Islamic beards.‘Look at the infidels scurrying about at our bidding,’ they must think. Why give them this satisfaction? It seems to me, as it has for some time, that old-fashioned beat coppers with a close, intimate knowledge of the areas they patrol would be much more likely to see these atrocities coming than clanking robocops, soldiers or our vaunted and hyped ‘security’ services, who are always claiming to protect us but have failed so completely in this and several other cases. Such killers almost invariably come from among the swirling underworld of drug-taking petty criminals.The Manchester murderer, Salman Abedi, was, unsurprisingly, a cannabis abuser. His recent behaviour – yelling prayers in the street – had been strange.Ought not someone in authority to have noticed when a bearded young religious fanatic with a drug habit started buying large quantities of hair bleach? He plainly wasn’t planning to become a blond. But who was there to listen to such fears? A police car driving by at 30mph? A phone number that nobody answers? A police station that’s shut? I HAVE noticed that any dissent from the standard view of these events is met, on social media and elsewhere, with attempts to claim that my views show some sort of disrespect to the victims and their grieving families.I will not give in to this nasty dictatorship of grief.I am just as distressed by the horrors of Manchester as anyone else. I refuse to be told I’m not sad enough, because I don’t conform to the Government’s thought-free response to it, which has now been failing for many years. Nor should you be.Get the soldiers back into their barracks, and bring back proper police foot patrols.

Finally, a great film (if only you can find it)

What a joy to see an intelligent film, slick, clever, surprising fast-moving, glamorous and thoughtful. Yet I had to seek it out at a late-night showing at the back of a multiplex, where the big screens were reserved for weary sequels of sequels.If you can find Miss Sloane, starring Jessica Chastain, please see it. But how can good movies succeed if they are hidden from us?

The BBC’s finest...peddling deadly cocaine

I was banned from the BBC’s supposedly wonderful Today programme several years ago, after I gave a live on-air pasting to the pro-drug Professor David Nutt. Before that I used to get on quite a lot, but since then, nothing.I have often wondered since if the programme had a deep-seated bias against our drug laws. It always seemed to give prominent coverage to any call to soften those laws.Well, on Thursday morning, I think we got proof.Today once essential, has in recent years become so dull and complacent that I often doze off while listening.It is claimed that its audience has gone up. If so it must be composed of supermarket check-out robots, whose idea of excitement is to shout ‘Unexpected item in bagging area!’ Nobody else could actively want to listen to its lifeless daily rehearsals of Leftish conventional wisdom.But on Thursday there was an unexpected item in the drugging area. I suddenly realised I was listening to a man giving out the current prices for various kinds of cocaine.Hang on, I thought, as I shook myself into full wakefulness. The programme normally gives out exchange rates for the US dollar, and the stock market index. But the price of cocaine? This was new. Cocaine is a Class A drug under the Misuse Of Drugs Act 1971. This means you can get life imprisonment for selling it, and seven years in jail for buying it. To want to know the price, or to give it out, surely condones a serious crime.And the BBC has a vested interest in being in favour of law enforcement. Its licence fee is collected under the threat of fines and imprisonment.If the BBC wants that law enforced, it must surely support all law enforcement. I can’t see it being pleased if other media gave soft, wet interviews to advocates of licence-fee evasion.Yet here was some bloke merrily discoursing on what cocaine costs, which is surely of no interest to any law-abiding person. Then, wholly unchallenged by an utterly soppy presenter, this character claimed it was ‘difficult to have honest conversations saying you can use lots of drugs with relatively low risks, for most people, if you follow some simple strategies’.Difficult? Where is it difficult? What’s difficult is to call for the law to be enforced.Who now denies that cocaine is in common, unchecked use among students, bankers, politicians and, perhaps above all, media and broadcasting types? The guest added (still uninterrupted): ‘Instead of simply saying to people, “Don’t use drugs, they’re dangerous”, that’s not a useful dialogue for people who are making informed decisions to use drugs as a wider lifestyle.‘That person might also go to yoga and be a vegetarian. You know it’s about a lifestyle choice and we need to help people stay safe with the choices they make.’I asked the BBC for a response. Not merely was that response useless in the extreme, and nothing to do with the questions I had asked, they actually asked me to use it in full.Well, I haven’t room to do that, but I will post it on my blog so that you can laugh at it.

*The BBC's reply is now posted on the blog, in the posting immediately after (and so above) this one. Or click on this link

Why this is a mad country: Applicants for jobs in nursing are being turned away because they cannot speak good enough English. The response of the authorities is to consider lowering the standards nurses are required to meet. We can all see what is wrong with this, but it will almost certainly happen.

If you want to comment on Peter Hitchens, click on Comments and scroll down